A week after the release of a new ULI report on urban heat effects and the built environment, a ULI Washington event focused on how the city is planning for and responding to urban heat issues. While Washington, D.C., is in many ways a leader on this issue, speakers agreed that equity issues need to be addressed in addition to specific policy changes.

In June, a group of 125 of Denver’s public-, private-, and nonprofit-sector leaders came to study Copenhagen’s brand of sustainable urbanism with the Denver Downtown Partnership (DDP) Urban Exploration program. The DDP study group included 61 members of ULI Colorado, Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock, several Denver City Council members, and city and county staff members. The study tour explored the city of Copenhagen “through three lenses: livability, equity, and economic innovation, in which growth goes hand-in-hand with quality of life,” said one official.

Worldwide, this past July was the hottest month on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. A new ULI report, Scorched: Extreme Heat and Real Estate, notes that such rising temperatures and excessive heat waves are already affecting urban development and reviews strategies that can help mitigate the effects on communities.

The Washington Housing Initiative wants to put capital to work to preserve a dwindling supply of workforce housing across the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, bringing together a large group of public and private stakeholders—including experienced multifamily developers, owners, and operators—to create a strategic model addressing the workforce housing shortage that can be shared broadly with other communities battling the same problem.

Interest rates have been on a roller-coaster ride over the last year, but cap rates are largely unchanged. The result of these moves is that cap rate spreads relative to the safe investments in the 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds have moved back to the levels seen in 2017. Given everything that has changed over the last year—as well as everything that has not—there may be room for cap rate spreads to move lower.

A new generation of innovators in commercial real estate is taking inspiration from—and even going beyond—the hospitality industry’s focus on customer service and satisfaction to invent new ways to make residential and office tenants happier.

A ULI Advisory Services panelists shares learnings from his experience on a recent ULI Advisory Services panel working with the city of Miami and the Miami Downtown Development Authority on its waterfront resilience efforts.

Under the Clean Energy D.C. Omnibus Amendment Act, the District is planning to move entirely to renewable electricity by 2032, with the goal of cutting the city’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by that year as part of its broader commitment to becoming entirely carbon neutral by 2050. To meet those goals, building owners will be required to make energy retrofits on about half of the buildings in the city. To help owners prepare for these changes, ULI partnered with the DowntownDC Business Improvement District for an Advisory Services panel in July.